The most peculiar thing about antisemitism (except for the concept itself which is frankly ridiculous) is the phrase itself. The words “Semitic” is in fact today used to refer to a group of languages rather than a group of people.
And that group of languages is used by a wide collection of different people – including Arabs, Maltese, and yes, Hebrew speaking Jews.
The phrase “antisemitic” was first coined by Jew-haters to make their hatred seem more normalised and scientific. Yet, the word has been normalised and accepted by their opponents – essentially letting the Jew-haters win.
According to Jonathan M. Hess, the term was originally used by its authors to “stress the radical difference between their own ‘antisemitism’ and earlier forms of antagonism toward Jews and Judaism.”
It is not for me to dictate to anyone, but it seems to me that we should perhaps give these scum back their original names. Call a spade a spade, and a Jew-hater exactly what they are.
Normally when you set an IP address manually on an interface you do not get a whole lot of choice of how it is done – very often you have to specify the IP address itself and a network mask. The addresses and masks are almost always specified as “dotted quads” (10.0.0.1) rather than the real address in binary or decimal (167772161).
The network mask specifies what parts of the IP address are the network address and which are the host address – to determine whether a destination needs to go via a gateway or is on the local network. This is expressed as a bitmask like 255.255.255.0. Having said that, rarely some devices (Cisco routers in the dustier parts of their code) require the reverse – 0.0.0.255.
An alternative approach is to use the CIDR format to specify both the IP address of the device and the size of the network – 10.2.9.21/24. This is used (at least) on Palo Alto Networks firewalls and is probably the simplest way of configuring a network address I have come across.
Having configured hundreds of devices with static addresses … and helped solve oodles of network configuration issues, I feel that the CIDR format method is likely to be far less error prone.
If you do need to set a netmask, use ipcalc to check what it is (and use it to cut&paste rather than risk typos) :-
One of the things that irritates me about fancy new service management systems like systemd is that unless you get everything exactly right, you can end up with things interfering with specific configuration files – specifically /etc/resolv.conf.
Now as a DNS administrator, I have a certain fondness for manually controlling /etc/resolv.conf and it does actually come in useful for making temporary changes to test specific DNS servers and the like. The trouble comes when something else wants to control that file.
The ideal fix for this conflict is to have things like systemd control a separate file such as /etc/system/resolv.conf.systemd, and for /etc/resolv.conf be installed as a symbolic link pointing at the real file.
But back in the real world, if you do disable systemd-resolver which can be done with: systemctl disable systemd-resolved.service; systemctl stop systemd-resolved.service
Then you may also want to make the file immutable: chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf. On at least one server, systemd merrily re-created /etc/resolv.conf as a symbolic link to an empty file despite systemd-resolved being disabled.
Apple’s stockprice has taken a bit of a tumble just recently, prompted by a statement from them indicating that they’ve made a bit of a mess of the iPhone releases and they’re not selling as many as they expected.
Foolish scaremongers are predicting the demise of Apple. Over a few bad quarters? That’s just ridiculous.
If anything (and you fancy a gamble), now is probably a good time to buy shares in Apple, because they are not going away any time soon. And they will probably come up with an answer to what they are doing wrong.
So what are they doing wrong?
Too Few Products
It may seem a bit strange to say considering just how many different iPhones you can buy, but what I am really talking about here are product types rather than individual variations. After all whether you are buying an iPhone X, XS, XS Max, or XR, you’re still buying an iPhone.
Just take a look at the Apple web site navigation bar :-
Each of those (with the possible exception of a particular keen Mac user of the “Mac” group, and of course “Music”) is a product that a person is only likely to have one of.
And keeping the number of products you sell small makes you more vulnerable to the occasional “miss”. Which with the best planning in the world will happen from time to time.
Just imagine what is missing :-
The Apple HiFi
The Apple alarm clock.
The Apple home/small office network server.
The Apple power-line ethernet adaptor.
The Apple WiFi access point.
The Apple air pollution monitor/smoke detector.
And that’s just a few items thought up by an individual on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Don’t Ignore The Fringe Fanatics
For many years, Apple survived by making products well suited to the audio/visual creator community. And yet looking through the Mac line-up, there is nothing there suited to the real power user.
And yet Apple has fans who still want to run macOS – either compromising on their needs by getting an iMac Pro (usually with huge piles of non-Apple external disks) or by getting an ordinary PC and running macOS on it.
Give them what they want, and no a promise to release a proper Mac Pro “someday” isn’t sufficient.
There may not be a great deal of profit in it, but a small profit is better than none. And catering to power users may well have a greater effect than you suppose – they are or can be influencers. Imagine every photographer, videographer, and sound engineer saying “Forget about Windows; get yourself a Mac”.
Because that’s what they used to say.
Too Expensive
If you ask anyone if they would like more features, the answer is almost always yes, but they can become more reluctant if you ask them to pay a little more money for those features.
And if you ask them to pay more for features they are not interested in, they’ll rapidly lose interest if money is tight and their old phone is ‘good enough’.
And that is what has happened, the latest iPhone has more and better features than any previous iPhone but the price has crept up. For many (including the affluent “middle-class”) it has become a significant purchase rather than something that can be paid off with 2-4 months of minor inconvenience.
There are a bunch of people out there who jump on every single piece of ‘evidence’ they can find or construct that supposedly contradicts the evidence that the climate is changing for the warmer (and that it is mostly human activity driven).
Why?
In the beginning, some of them may have been honestly dumb, and objected to the notion of global warming simply because it challenged some of their favourite activities. After all who could believe that people could influence the climate?
And after all, what do climate scientists know? They’re just book smart and everyone knows that common sense beats book smart every time.
But over time, something else creeps in (and in some cases is there from the beginning) – a tendency to abuse the human liking for controversy to get more “hits” and a higher profile than would otherwise be the case.
And money of course.
So when you find random people on the Internet throwing rocks at the experts, bear in mind that they might just be innocently dumb or they might have an ulterior motive.
But let’s face it: They’re not after the truth no matter how much they claim otherwise.
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